It's Coming For You...

Have you ever had one of those nightmares where something hideous is coming to get you? It’s getting closer and closer, your heart is beating fast and fear is infusing every inch of your body. You know that you need to wake up, you have to wake up, you try to move, but you can’t, you’re completely paralysed, and it’s coming closer and you can't stop it. You can't wake up, you have to wake up.

Sleep paralysis.

I used to have these nightmares as a child, but the first one that I clearly remember was when I was in my 20’s.

I was asleep in bed and woke up when I heard footsteps on the stairs. I knew no one else was in the house. I tried to move, but couldn’t. My body felt weighed down, I tried to move my hands - I couldn't even lift a finger, I tried to shout, nothing. I could barely breathe as dread filled me. Fear took over and intensified as the footsteps grew closer and closer.

The handle on the door turned, and the door was slowly pushed open. A clown’s head moved into view, staring at me. It was like the clown from It, Pennywise, or similar to it. It was a clown. In my room. A f*cking clown. And I was awake and couldn’t run because I was paralysed. And it was walking towards me. I tried to move, to force myself awake and out of this nightmare and I couldn’t do it. I was screaming and screaming, but no sound came out.

After having a few of these I found that, despite feeling the indescribable terror of having some clown, hag or some other stuff of nightmares coming to get me when I couldn’t move, there was a way that I could wake myself up.

Braving The Fear

The downside was that to wake up I had to relax. I had to let go of the fear. I needed to breathe, relax my body, close my eyes, let myself fall asleep again, and then I could wake up.

Have you ever tried relaxing and going back to sleep when you are living your worst nightmare? Every voice in the chorus of your fear screams against it. It goes against all logic, but that’s what worked, every time. To wake up out of the nightmare I had to remember that it was a nightmare, and I had to stop participating in it. I had to step back from my experience.

It doesn’t just work with nightmares either. Any sort of internal struggle stops when we stop fighting and running away from it. That one took considerably longer to learn.

The Struggle Fuels Our Suffering

Some of us live much of our lives struggling against more nameless fears. Our nightmares, instead of coming in the form of clowns, are the objections that we hear from our own inner critic, working hard to dissuade us from living a life that's different from the one we have now.

It would be easier if we could picture a clown or hag saying the words to us. At least then we'd stand a better chance of recognising what's going on.

Sometimes this voice stops us from resting and enjoying our life. Tirelessly wearing us down with its need to keep us busy, wear us out, conform. Telling us that we're selfish, lazy, that we don't deserve better. We start believing it when it says that we’re not good enough, that we need to change, to try to be a better person, to fit in, making ourselves into what it tells us we should be.

We listen to it and do what it says should make us happy, not what does actually makes us happy.

We deny ourselves what we want, who we want, how we want to live.

We lie to ourselves, over and over again, telling ourselves that we're fine, that we can manage, that we're ok, burying our truth deep inside us.

We might be screaming inside, but we don't let anyone hear it.

Our inner critic tells us that people will hurt us so we build walls to defend ourselves, and use words and actions and flawed logic to keep our dreams and those who would love us at bay.

We increase our suffering by being afraid of expressing ourselves (our inner critic tells us that we're too much, that no one is interested), by not being honest with the one person we desperately need on our side - ourselves. And we further turn against ourselves by believing our own stories of why something could never work, rather than stopping, silencing the noise and finding out.

We're so caught up in the nighmare that we bury our heads in an everyday life and we don't notice it slowly turning grey over time.

When we keep fighting our fears, anxiety, insecurities and constraints we give them far more power than they actually have on their own, we feed our nightmares. Just as knots become harder to unravel if we pull at them, our struggles cause our anxieties to become stronger, tighter, more restrictive, more real.

Waking Up From The Nighmare

Eventually, we need to stop and take a look at the nightmares that we have created. It takes a lot of energy and effort to keep them going and we can only do it for so long. Our brain grows tired of finding ways around the things that we want so dearly because they don’t go away. They may grow quieter, but they never disappear.

- To stop feeling anxious we learn to stop listening to it.

- To stop feeling insecure we see our insecurities for what they are.

- To stop feeling afraid we acknowledge that fear and eventually, become brave enough to walk through it.

- To live a life of freedom, we face what’s keeping us constrained within ourselves.

And so eventually we slow down, weary of fighting and running; and we stop; and breathe, and face what’s coming our way. Only then can we see it for what it is.

Then we can wake up.